No one can deny that you need traffic to your website in order to succeed online. And nothing beats free traffic. And where’s the best place to get free traffic? Google and other search engines.

How do we get free traffic from Google?

This is something you’ve experienced first hand countless times. You visit your favorite search engine. Enter in a word or phrase you want to research. Then you click on one of the pages that in displayed. Turns out that the website you visit just got free traffic from the search engine. We will be discussing here how to get website traffic to you for free.

You probably only visit a link or two from the first page of results. In fact, the first page of results receives almost all the free traffic. And what’s more, the first 3 get over 70% of the clicks.

This means that to get any real traffic you need to be on the first page in Google. To do that, you need to be “ranked” in Google’s Top 10 results. Which brings up..

What is search engine optimization?

Search Engine Optimization is a measure of how well Google and other search engines think your website matches the search terms people are typing into their search boxes. The intricate formula Google uses to figure this out is really only known by Google. However, we do know a few things that count.

Getting indexed

Before you can get ranked, Google has to first know your site exists. This is known as being “indexed.” What this means is that Google visits your site and records information about it in their database.

In order to get indexed, Google has to be able to find you. And the best way for Google to find you is to get inbound links from other sites. Google will actually follow the links on sites it already has indexed to find new sites and index them.

A couple of great places to do this are in your Twitter or Facebook profiles. Google visits these sites many times every day. So any new links will be followed right away.

Gaining ranking

After this first hurdle, you need to start gaining ranking. Just getting indexed does you almost no good, considering that Google has billions of pages in their database.

There are three components of gaining ranking:

• Content
• Links
• Activity

Optimized content

This is also called on-page SEO. You need to make sure your content matches the search terms you’re going after. Obviously, the article you’re reading now is about search engine optimization. One way Google figures this out is from the fact that it contains the term SEO. And another way this is determined is by the other related phrases like traffic generation that are also in the article.

In addition to the content on the page, other things to keep in mind are the title tags on the page, and the domain name itself. Each of these plays a roles in Google determination about your site.

Link juice

The second factor is your linking. The links coming in and the links going out are included in this. You want to make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links. The more inbound links you have the better your ranking will be.

Article spinning is a super easy way to get a bunch of inbound links. To use this technique you write articles related to the topic of your websites. Then create a bunch of different versions of it. And then upload a different versions to a bunch of sites that allow you to add content. And quantity is the key here – so do lots and lots.

Getting activity

And lastly, it’s seems clear that Google expects important pages to be actively updated. A page that was created 3 years ago and hasn’t been touched since won’t rank well. So you need to update your pages often. One way to keep adding new content it through RSS feeds.

Another great way to keep your page content fresh is to enable comments on it and allow others to discuss your page topic. This means you need to get real live people to your site, as well. An easy way to do this is from forums.

Create profiles on lots of forums about your site’s topic. Visit often and make posts. Then put a link to your site in your profile. This gets you inbound links. And it will also get real visitors to your site.

Conclusion

It’s important that you do everything listed here. Unfortunately, rewriting your articles again and again. And creating a bunch of forum profiles. And posting your content all over the web is time consuming. Which means you probably won’t end up doing it.

Fortunately, you can get rank builder software to do all the grunt work for you. So the best thing you can do is to automate this process. This way you’ll actually do it. And if you don’t do it, you simply will not ever get free traffic from Google.

If you’ve got traffic coming to your site, you’re 99% there. The other 1% is what you do with that traffic, but if you have to traffic – you can figure out the rest. What you do with the traffic when it gets to your site could be any number of things. So, the critical step is to generate a steady flow of visitors.

How, then do you get traffic to your site?

Here’s a short list of great, free traffic generating methods:

• Web 2.0 Methods
• Article Marketing
• Video Marketing

Let’s talk about each of these.

Web 2.0 Methods

Web 2.0 simply means the new family of websites that have user-generated content. These are great sites to work with because they allow you to participate in this content creation. Because these sites get so much traffic, Google and the other search engines treat these sites with greater importance in their algorithms. And that’s important to you because it means that Google and the other search engines treat links from these sites as more meaningful than links from other sites. By placing links to your websites in this content you’ve created, you get traffic from the site and search engine ranking for the keywords you choose. This is the hidden benefit of using Web 2.0 sites. There are many more web 2.0 traffic tactics we don’t have time to get into here, but this will get you started.

Articles Sites

Article marketing really builds on the Web 2.0 concept. Article sites are in essence web 2.0 websites. In typical web 2.0 fashion, article sites rely on user-generated content (i.e. your articles). Just as with the other web 2.0 sites, having your content included gives you immediate traffic and search engine ranking. And the hidden benefit here is that your reach grows as other people take your articles and put them on their blogs and sites. And because the terms of the directory say they have to include your “resource box” you get links back from all these other sites, too. In order to get the most free traffic make sure you:

• Do your keyword research
• Write your article for the keywords you’ve chosen
• Hyperlink these keywords to your website – both in the content of the article and in your author’s info section.

Video Marketing

The last of this group is video marketing. Once again, this is really a sub-set of web 2.0. And it carries all the same benefits of article marketing. And in addition to this, because Google and the others love video so much, you can get listed for highly competitive keywords much more easily.

Here’s how to get free traffic using video…

• Get a YouTube account
• Make your profile uncluttered by turning off all the modules
• Put relevant “tags” in your profile
• Add a link to your website
• Upload at least 1 video
• In the title, the description and the tags for each video, include your main keywords

In closing…

If you take action on the items listed here you’ll have free traffic in no time.

Let’s talk about some powerful ways to get free and automated traffic coming to your website.

Traffic is useless . . . unless…

Before you begin trying to get traffic to your site, you need to do your keyword research first. The reason this is so important is that you are going to be building content and traffic sources for specific keywords. So you need to make sure the keywords you’re targeting are worth targeting.

While doing your keyword research, keep the following in mind:

• Are the keywords you’re interested in attainable? Take a look at the “strength” of others websites (and how many) are already targeting these keywords.
• What kinds of visitors do these keywords bring? If you don’t do your research you’ll end up with a lot of traffic that doesn’t buy from you. What you want is buyers!
• What about affiliates? If you want to build a huge business, you’re going to need affiliates to help you. This means that some of your traffic focus should be on getting affiliates to your site.

This is critical to your business, but it takes a lot of time and effort. Experts are expensive and don’t guarantee results. And that’s why most people skip this step! The smartest marketers use website traffic software to automate this and other aspects of their business. Using tools like this speed up the process and improve your results, too!

OK, now we can talk about traffic…

Once you’ve done your properly keyword research, you’re now ready to start targeting these keywords to draw in visitors.

Powerful Traffic Tactics:

• Something you may not have ever considered is Surveys
• “Answer” Sites
• Video Websites

Surveys

The truth is that people really enjoy taking surveys and finding out what other people think. And smart website owners know this, so they will include your survey on their site if you make a good one. And when they put your survey on their site, they will include a link back to your website. Think about that – you get website traffic for free just for making a survey! Most people think surveys are just for collecting data, but in this case you don’t even care about the answers. The only thing you have to do is think of a novel question for your survey.

“Answer” Sites

These sites, like answers.yahoo.com are filled with people asking and answering questions for each other. But, like the surveys, that’s not why you’re going to pay attention to these sites. You are going to generate traffic, leads and sales from them. Now, you can do this all by hand – visit a classified ads or answers site and one by one copy and paste contact info. So, if you’re smart, you’ll use website traffic software to do it all for you. Then you just get a daily batch of fresh leads delivered to your inbox.

Video Sharing Sites

No doubt you’re aware of YouTube and other video websites. YouTube is one of the most highly traffic and search websites on the entire internet! If you’re not taking advantage of this rich source of website traffic, then you are really missing out.

Even if you don’t think you can make a good video. You can even take a webpage or article that you’ve written. Then just do a screen capture of yourself going through it. I’ve even seen software that will automatically convert an article to a video!

The Bottom Line…

It’s not that hard to get traffic to your websites. Just be a creative and think outside the box a bit. And today there are tons of options for software tools that can help with every part of this process.

Don’t waste any more time:

• Do your keyword research
• Then create some surveys born to go viral
• Build your traffic traps
• And don’t forget about video